The EU should stop throwing good money after bad.

Throwing cold water on Scandimania.

Key questions for the new year.

Europe’s large welfare states are dragging the continent down.

Europe is in deep trouble. That’s an oversimplification, of course, since there are a handful of nations that seem to be moving in the right direction (or at least not moving rapidly in the wrong direction). But notwithstanding those exceptions, Europe in general issuffering from economic stagnation caused by a bloated public sector. Barring dramatic change, another fiscal crisis is […]

I’m not a big fan of Obamanomics. I don’t like the President’s class-warfare mentality on taxes. I don’t like his support for Keynesian spending policy. And I don’t like his costly expansions of government such as Obamacare. Indeed, I even like mocking his reflexive statism. That being said, I fully agree (albeit with some important caveats) with his observation that the United States […]

I’m a big believer that real-world examples can teach us about the benefits of good fiscal policy (think Hong Kong, Estonia, Canada, and the U.S. under Reagan and Clinton) and the costs of bad fiscal policy (France, Cyprus, Greece, and the U.S. under Bush and Obama). Today, let’s look at another example of bad fiscal policy. And we’re going to pick on […]

Libertarians tend to like – or at least have a grudging respect for – the underground economy. For instance, even if we’re personally very straight-laced, we don’t like government prohibitions against gambling, drugs, and prostitution. This is why we’re not upset when these things happen in spite of the laws enacted by the political class. But […]

I wrote the other day that Americans, regardless of all the bad policy we get from Washington, should be thankful we’re not stuck in a hellhole like Venezuela. But we also should be happy we’re not Europeans. This is a point I’ve made before, usually accompanied by data showing that Americans have significantly higher living standards than their cousins on the other […]